Teaching Vocabulary and Concepts

Chapter 8: Developing Vocabulary and Concepts

All teachers know the importance of vocabulary to their specific content area.  What many teachers fail to realize is how much vocabulary students are expected to remember as well as the difficulty of forming connections between the term and its meaning.  Chapter 8 of Content Area Reading lists a variety of comprehensive ways to increase retention and understanding of vocabulary for your content area.

Chapter 8 talks about the practice of dividing content vocabulary by order of importance.  Words that are going to be used a lot and are foundational words that other vocabulary is built off of should be learned first and should have the most comprehensive practice.  Without building strong vocabulary foundations, students cannot build upon them to grasp more complex concepts.

Using graphic organizers to connect concepts is a great way to help students understand relationships between vocabulary and concepts.  Being able to organize concepts helps students realize hierarchies in vocabulary and gives them a visual representation of the inter-workings of a content area - something that most teachers take for granted.  Scaffolding this activity is essential.  In order to gain the benefits that arise out of vocabulary activities (such as comprehension and memorization), teacher must first capture the students' interest.

A good way to do this is by discovering what students already know about vocabulary and concepts.  Having the students participate in word exploration, which is a write-to-learn activity that allows students to gather their thoughts about the word or concept and relate it to prior knowledge.  Similar ways to activate prior knowledge is by brainstorming, listing, and categorizing.  An important vocabulary skill that requires the application of prior knowledge is the strategy of defining a word based on its context.  As an English teacher, this skill is especially important since students will constantly be discovering words they do not know - even more so than in content areas such as science where most difficult words are explained by the textbook or teacher.  This strategy requires that students use the context and words around it to discover what a word means.  This is a very important reading lifeskill as well.

Once a vocabulary word or concept is introduced and prior knowledge is explored, teachers must do more exercises to make sure a student is reinforcing their new knowledge so they can truly understand it and remember it.  Reinforced knowledge allows teachers to extend the concept to build upon other concepts, using it as a scaffold to expand knowledge and increase learning.  Great ways to reinforce vocabulary and scaffold concepts is by using graphic organizers.  Many different kinds of graphic organizers and visual examples of them begin on page 259 of Content Area Reading.